Ask Nigel: August 1

Dear Shant,
The fellow of whom you speak raced under the name of 'B. Bira', but his true name was Prince Birabongse Bhanuban of Siam (later Thailand). An interesting aside is that his grandfather, King Mongkut, was the inspiration for the 1950s movie, The King and I, which starred Yul Brynner.

Born in 1914, Bira was educated at Eton and Cambridge, after which he went to live in London. He shared a flat with his cousin, Prince Chula Chakrabongse and studied sculpture, at which he proved so adept that ultimately his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Bira began racing in 1935 at Brooklands, first in a Riley Imp, then a MG Magnette, but it became a little more serious when Chula bought him an ERA (for his 21st birthday...), which was christened 'Romulus'. In this car, against the similar machines of drivers like Dick Seaman, he was an immediate success in the 'Voiturette' class, a sort of Formula 2 of the time.

The team, run by Chula, and with Bira as the only driver, was called The White Mouse Stable, and with a variety of ERAs - two subsequent cars were christened 'Remus' and 'Hanuman' - competed with great success through the remaining years of the 1930s, both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. A Delahaye sports car was later added to the stable, and Bira also drove various other cars, including an Alfa Romeo which he shared with the great Raymond Sommer at Le Mans in 1939.

In driving style, Bira seems to have been in the Alain Prost mould, very fast, yet neat and unobtrusive. In 1936, '37 and '38, he won the BRDC Road Racing Gold Star.

During the war years, Bira and his cousin - both now married to English 'society gels' - remained in Britain, based in Cornwall, and when hostilities ceased they revived their team, and immediately went racing again.

The White Mouse Stable disappeared after the 1948 season, but Bira continued to race over the years, driving for such as HWM, Gordini and OSCA, before settling on privately owned Maseratis - in the blue and yellow livery of Siam - for the balance of his career. In 1954 he was one of the first to buy Maserati's new 250F, and his final victory was in the non-championship New Zealand Grand Prix in 1955. A few months afterwards, he retired from racing. He died in London, at the age of 74, in 1988.

You ask if Bira was quick or rich: the answer is both.





Dear Ruairi,
Not an easy question to answer, for the very good reason that I have rarely found myself at a really demanding corner when a coming ace has taken it for the first time. Life doesn't work that way, I'm afraid.

The thing is, what do you mean by 'the first time'? You mention Hakkinen at Estoril, and I presume you're talking the Portuguese Grand Prix in 1993. Having worked as McLaren test driver through the season, Mika finally got to race for the team at Estoril, following the sacking of Michael Andretti, and he rather shook everyone by out-qualifying his team mate, one Ayrton Senna.

"That really got Ayrton's attention," Jo Ramirez remembered. "For the first time that season he was suddenly very interested in looking at his team mate's 'traces', and what astonished him was that Mika was making up the time in the first two corners, both of them ultra-quick right-handers."

I certainly remember watching Hakkinen through those turns that afternoon, and blindingly quick he was - but this isn't quite the same as going through them 'for the first time' on a flying lap. Prior to that weekend, Mika had, of course, done hundreds of laps in testing at Estoril. And that really is the whole point here: unless the circumstances are freak, no top driver ever comes to race an F1 car at a track unknown to him: chances are he will either have raced there before, in a junior category, or that he will have tested there.

I could talk all day about the sight of Jochen Rindt or Ronnie Peterson through the original, virtually flat out Woodcote Corner at Silverstone, but if there is an image of one driver and one corner which is indelible in my mind for ever, it is of Gilles Villeneuve through the Courbe de Pouas, at Dijon, in qualifying in 1981.

This was a very fast, undulating, flat-in-fourth, right-hander, with no run-off worth the name, and Gilles had crashed there during Saturday morning practice. During the lunch break I found him dabbing a cut on his jaw: "Bloody catch fence pole cracked my helmet, and broke through the visor..."

"You overdid it?" I asked. "Just ran out of road?" "No, no," Gilles grinned, "I ran out of lock! This thing" - he pointed to the turboharged Ferrari 126C - "is a shitbox at the best of times, but through that corner it's really terrible - an adventure every time. Go and have a look this afternoon, and you'll see what I mean."

I did. I watched the Cosworth-powered Williams and Brabhams drone through, on rails, and waited.

At its clipping point, at the top of a rise, the Ferrari was already sideways, its driver winding on opposite lock. As it came past me, plunging downhill now, the tail stayed out, further and further, and still Gilles had his foot hard in it. As the car reached the bottom of the dip, the situation looked hopeless, for now it was virtually broadside, full lock on, Villeneuve's head pointing up the road - out of the side of the cockpit...

Somehow, though, the Ferrari did not spin, finally snapping back into line as it grazed the catch fencing, then rocketing away up the hill. For more than 100 yards, I swear it, the car was sideways, at over 130mph. "That's genius," said David Hobbs, watching with me. "Are you seriously telling me he's won two Grands Prix in that?"

Yes, he had. And one of them was Monaco.




Dear Phil,
You and your friend are quite right: James Hunt and Niki Lauda did indeed end their driving careers very suddenly - although Niki resumed his a couple of years later. Both quit in 1979, Hunt at Monte Carlo and Lauda at Montreal.

Hunt was an instinctive racer. He would admit willingly that his approach to motor racing was not particularly deep, and that he acknowledged was both good and bad. He was never a man to 'think himself' into a Grand Prix for a week before hand, never one to allow distractions to get to him.

"Conversely," he said, "in bad times some drivers will get stuck into the root of the problem, and regenerate enthusiasm in the team. And I was never the man to do that."

It was in such circumstances that James retired, and, typically, he did it in the middle of a season. Following his World Championship year, in 1976, he won several more races for McLaren, but after a poor season in '78 left to join Walter Wolf's team.

At the Monaco Grand Prix of 1979, his car expired early in the race, and he walked away from it without a backward glance. "It was over," he said. "I knew this was my last race, and I hated that car, anyway. I felt no sadness at all, just immense relief."

Hunt was always well aware of the risks in an era far more perilous than this one. Often he was sick before a race, but from tension rather than fear. Once in the car, though, he was all business, everything subjugated by 'the competitive situation.'

While there have always been drivers prepared to fight as hard for fourth place as for first, Hunt was emphatically not of their number. "I always needed to feel I could win," he said, "and in my last couple of seasons I didn't have the car to do it. I wasn't prepared to go on risking my life to finish seventh, or whatever."

It takes a brave man to admit to fear. "I was getting scared of hurting myself," he said. "I don't think that would have happened if I had been in a car that could win, because that's the way I am: in a competitive situation, everything else goes out of my head. But I didn't have that for my last couple of years, and I was never the type to get pleasure from simply being a racing driver. Driving a racing car, when you've got the ability, is like riding a bike. You don't get worse at it. It's only your head that moves around, right?"

Racing drivers, James concluded, slow down because they lose motivation, for whatever reason. He could never understand, though, how or why their level of bravery should decrease. "In my book, driving at ten-tenths is no more dangerous than at seven-tenths - all it means, after all, is that you're going 2-3mph faster at any given point on a circuit. And, frankly, an accident at 167mph isn't going to be any better than one at 170. For me, driving at the limit didn't change the risk. Whenever I made mistakes on my own, it was when I wasn't trying - I wasn't concentrating hard enough. So it was always more likely I'd shunt in an uncompetitive car."

In the case of Lauda, it was more boredom than anything else. He had won two World Championships with Ferrari, then moved to Bernie Ecclestone's Brabham-Alfa team for 1978. In '79 he was generally slower than his young team mate, Nelson Piquet, and thinking more and more about Lauda Air, to which he intended to devote himself after retirement.

For all that, he signed a new contract with Ecclestone - at an unheard of two million dollars - for 1980, but when he got to Montreal, in September, it suddenly struck him that he didn't want to drive any more. On hand was the new Cosworth-powered BT49, and when Niki drove it in practice, he could see its potential, but still it didn't reawaken his enthusiasm. After spending his entire F1 career in cars with 12-cylinder engines, he found the sound of the DFV V8 boring and flat, and said that it mirrored his mood.

At the end of the Saturday morning practice session, he told his boss he didn't want to drive any more, and Bernie understood perfectly. Ricardo Zunino, a young Argentine driver who had gone to Montreal to watch, thus took over the Brabham in the afternoon - wearing Lauda's helmet and overalls! Niki, meantime, disappeared off to California to begin his new life.

Racing was not, though, completely out of his system. By the beginning of 1982 he was back, now with McLaren, and won his third race, at Long Beach. In 1984 came his third World Championship, and then, at the end of '85, he retired again, this time for good.




Dear Roger,
As a general rule, I have always made it my business to avoid punch-ups, and perhaps it's my good luck that I tend to loathe the sort of pubs where such things are on the cards.

If, however, I were to find myself in that sort of situation, the three drivers you cite - and particularly Jones and Purley - would have been very desirable company, and I fancy that AJ Foyt or Parnelli Jones would have been better than either!

I can still remember the faces of Frank Williams and Patrick Head when Jones, their number one driver and reigning World Champion, turned up at Monza in 1981 with a broken finger, this the legacy of an altercation with some gentlemen in a Transit in the Chiswick High Road a couple of nights earlier. Sadly, the demands of political correctness in this benighted age prevents my relating the story as Alan told it...

If it were not enough that he turned up less than fully fit for the Italian Grand Prix, Jones further made his bosses' weekend by informing them later that, oh by the way, he'd decided to retire at the end of the season, that he was sorry he hadn't let them know a bit earlier, before all the other stars had committed themselves elsewhere...

Frank's attitude to racing drivers, I have never doubted, changed for ever that weekend.




Dear Colin,
You're right that sometimes, in NASCAR and CART races, the pace car does indeed lead the field through the pits, but this happens very rarely - and never, as you say, in Formula 1.

I think we have to recognise that, while pace cars are used in all three series, in F1 we tend to use them in a different way.

In the States, when there is an accident of some consequence, by tradition they bring out the pace car, and the cars tool round behind it for however long it takes to clear up the mess. In F1, however, the Safety Car (as we call it) is used much more sparingly.

At Monza last year there was a dreadful accident on the opening lap, which involved many more cars than did the Hockenheim shunt last weekend, and although none of the drivers was injured, a marshal, sadly, was struck by debris, and died soon afterwards.

On that occasion, the race was not red-flagged; instead, the cars traipsed round behind the Safety Car for 11 laps. This wiped out nearly a quarter of the race, and seemed interminable to the spectators. More importantly, though, a man was mortally injured, and one truly felt that the race should have been stopped. Quite apart from anything else, there was debris all over the place - much of it razor-sharp shards of carbon fibre - and 11 times the cars drove through it.

Although the Race Director defended his decision not to halt proceedings, many - including Professor Watkins - felt very strongly that a major mistake had been made.

When the German Grand Prix was stopped, a lot of people murmured that this was solely because Michael Schumacher had been involved, and was apparently out for the day, in front of his adoring public. I hope and trust this was not the case, that lessons had been learned since Monza. Again there were slivers of carbon all over the place, and although the cars went through it only once, it was vital - as Michelin's Pierre Dupasquier stressed - that the teams had a chance to check the tyres on their cars before they got up to racing speeds once more. Like Monza, after all, Hockenheim is an extremely quick circuit.




Dear Mark,
Frankly, motor racing 'Grand Slams' do not terribly interest me, not least because there is so little chance these days of a driver having the opportunity to win one, however you define it. By and large, an F1 driver does F1, and that's the end of it, although Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya, with their Indy 500 wins and CART Championships, are exceptions to the rule.

You define your Grand Slam as Monaco, Indy and Le Mans, and that's reasonable enough, although Indy and Le Mans are devalued events these days, and require a huge amount of luck to win them: let's face it, a lot of journeymen have won Le Mans over time.

In America, some would define the Grand Slam as the Indy 500, the Daytona 500, and Le Mans, and only AJ Foyt has won all three. Or how about the World Championship, the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500? To me this is a more exalted Grand Slam, and only Mario Andretti has achieved it.

Still, if Grand Slams don't interest me much, clearly some of the drivers don't agree. For years Andretti has been bothered by the absence of a Le Mans win on his CV (second is his best finish there), and now Villeneuve says that he, too, would like to win it as a farewell to the sport.

Problem is, there's only one opportunity to win it each year, and, as I say, a massive amount of luck is involved - unless you're driving for Audi, against minimal opposition. Look at the lamented Bob Wollek - one of the greatest sports car drivers of all time, and he never managed to win it in 20-odd attempts. A great event, to be sure, but not, when you think about it, one usually won by 'racers'. That was why Stirling Moss loathed it...


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